Artist: Hiroshi Sugito
Exhibition title: Remainder
Venue: Lulu, Mexico City, Mexico
Date: April 22 – June 17, 2023
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Lulu, Mexico City
Lulu is honored to celebrate both its ten year anniversary and announce its closing with a solo exhibition of the Nagoya and Tokyo-based Japanese painter, Hiroshi Sugito.
What better way to conclude a decade of activities than with the work of Hiroshi Sugito? A highly influential painter and teacher, Sugito has made an expansive and significant mark upon painting in Japan. Perhaps like Lulu, Sugito has never sought to adhere to or represent any trends, forging his own idiosyncratic way forward. What Sugito makes gently drifts toward something altogether more timeless, in which it is possible to trace the influence of Byzantine fresco, Giotto, Cézanne, and more recently, René Daniels, among others. There are moments when his labored, built up, and patinated surfaces are more evocative of artifact than traditional painting, but paintings, full of marks, they are. The atmospheric, primitive and abstract imagery which suffuses his pictorial space is often characterized by a fleeting quality. For all their coy and pastel assertiveness, it is almost as if you could never look closely enough at them to properly grasp what they portray.
For his exhibition at Lulu, Sugito engages the entire space of Lulu as a pictorial space and locus of presentation, all but framing it with a series of intimately-scaled works on canvas as well as inside of painted cardboard boxes. The cardboard box works reflect the specific and unique architecture of Lulu, namely, its floating floors. In this particular case, Sugito was especially interested in the borders, the gutter around the floor of Lulu– the negative space which circumscribes it and the way it is activated by shadows. This is emphasized through Sugito’s checkered painting of the floor, which underlines the entire space of Lulu as a framing device. As such, Sugito both foregrounds the nature of Lulu while transforming it into a painting.
Hiroshi Sugito was born in 1970 in Aichi prefecture, Japan. He graduated from the Department of Japanese Painting, Faculty of Arts, Aichi Prefectural College of Arts in 1992. He is currently Associate Professor of the Department of Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts. He has exhibited extensively both in Japan and internationally since the 1990s. His major solo exhibitions include FOCUS (Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, USA, 2006), prime and foundation (Miyagi Museum of Art, Miyagi, Japan, 2015), frame and refrain (Musée Bernard Buffet, Shizuoka, Japan, 2015), particles and release (Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi, Japan, 2016), and Hiroshi Sugito module or lacuna (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 2017). Most recently, he exhibited at NonakaHill, Los Angeles (2022).
His significant group exhibitions include: Winter Garden: The Exploration of the Micropop Imagination in Contemporary Japanese Art, curated by Midori Matsui, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan, 2009; Japanisches Kulturinstitut, Cologne, Germany, 2009; The Japan Foundation, Tronto, Canada, 2010; Galeri’a Arnold Belkin, Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, Mexico, 2011); Garden of painting – Japanese Art of the 00s, The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan, 2010; Logical Emotion – Contemporary Art from Japan, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland, 2014; Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow MOCAK, Krakow, Poland, 2015; Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle (Saale), Halle, Germany, 2015; among many others.
